Thursday, March 15, 2018
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Yesterday, Adam Falkowski published his first blog post since September 2016, Where were we?. He starts by saying that particle physics is in crisis – which is no longer a prohibited word – because the LHC hasn't found any physics beyond the Standard Model.

He mentions texts by Hossenfelder, Giudice, and the Economist to prove that the "crisis" is being used. But there have always been people who preached about crises. More than two decades ago, in 1996, John Horgan published his "End of Science" diatribe. Ten years later, Šmoits introduced their own crisis hype. Adam, if you think that you're still substantially different from these three imbeciles, you might be wrong.

According to Falkowski, the continuation of particle physics as we knew it would be like the prolonged existence of the Soviet Union. Wow. Another troubling aspect of these assertions is that Falkowski continues to write business-as-usual papers on particle physics. Adam, maybe it's normal in your environment to do things that you consider worthless and be paid for them. But I think that you're showing the absence of academic integrity by doing so and I will always emphasize that this behavior is immoral.

Instead of "doing more of the same", Falkowski recommends some random buzzwords – switching to astrophysics, tabletop experiments, and precision physics, among a few others. The energy frontier should be abandoned. Be my guest: but you can only make decisions about yourself because you just denounced the offer to be the next Soviet dictator. ;-) You may switch – and you should switch – to astrophysics, tabletop experiments, and precision physics if you think it's a good idea. You're clearly not doing it – you're talking the talk but not walking the walk.

Some people work on astrophysics, tabletop experiments, and precision physics. They get some results that have only impressed others to a limited extent which is why others keep on doing other things. But you know what's happening when folks like Falkowski call for a random revolution in the field? They don't have any evidence that it would be an improvement – they just want to social engineer a new community and take credit simply for being consequential, whether or not it would bring anything good. That's wrong and it mustn't be allowed.

By the way, the increase of the energy is still the single most natural path to progress in experimental particle physics. All other experiments depend on much more specific and much more unlikely assumptions. So all these paths should be probed by somebody but Falkowski's call is nothing else than the call to ban the energy frontier and that's just totally wrong.

When Falkowski talked about the equivalence of particle physics and the Soviet Union, he also wrote the following:

But the driving force for all these SusyWarpedCompositeStringBlackHairyHole enterprise has always been the (small but still) possibility of being vindicated by the LHC.

But this is an absolute lie.

I've met most of the people who have studied SusyWarpedCompositeStringBlackHairyHole and I can assure you that the LHC has played virtually no role in their research. That the short-term experimental projects should determine what high energy theorists think about is a lie spread by Mr Sm*lin, Mr W*it, and similar feces. The more top-down or high-energy physics a theoretical physicist does, the more independent he or she is from any short-term events in experimental physics simply because the ongoing experiments are unlikely to address the most important questions directly.

In particular, an overwhelming majority of hep-th papers (as well as a substantial fraction of the hep-ph papers) has virtually nothing to do with any collider experiment of the current epoch because they're simply solving more far-reaching, long-term problems where the power of the human mind is more important than a powerful magnet. Feces may say that something like that should be impossible but it is possible and what feces say does not matter for science.

So please, Mr Falkowski, don't push for random revolutions within particle physics because your recommendations make no sense, have no justification, and are driven by your personal lack of excitement for the field. If you're not excited about your work, you should switch to another job, instead of poisoning the environment where many people actually know what they're doing and why they're doing it. You're clearly in the process of turning into another Hossenfelder-like lying piece of toxic šit and if you have a chance to stop it at all, you should do so as soon as possible. One vitriolic blog post that you write in two years may easily do more damage than all the positive things you have ever contributed to science.